ENJN Berlin Conference: Transforming media freedoms since ’89, accession and beyond

Background material for ENJN conference in Berlin - Part Two

Background material for ENJN conference in Berlin - Part One

ENJN conference on Fall of Berlin Wall 20th Anniversary

INLINE Communications: Online is the most popular source of information for europeans

Новый телеканал о географии может появиться в России

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The terrifying voyage of Burma's boat people

Here's a formula for making a killing in times of crisis. Go to the south-eastern tip of Bangladesh, on the border with Burma, and buy an old fishing boat. It'll cost 100,000 taka, or about £900. Then budget 450 pounds, for rice and drinking water, and maybe another £450 for bribes. Then head off and trawl for clients among the most destitute communities in Bangladesh – a country so densely populated country and so poor that for Britain to be on similar economic terms it would have to have a population of 200 million with an average income around four per cent of what a Briton's is today,

Google adds automatic captions to YouTube

Google, in a significant development for deaf Internet users, announced it was adding automatic caption capability to videos on YouTube. Google said machine-generated captions would initially be available only in English and on videos from 13 YouTube "partner channels" but it hopes to extend the feature eventually to all videos uploaded to the site. "Google believes that the world's information should be accessible to everyone," said Vint Cerf, a Google vice president who has been described as the "Father of the Internet." "One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone," said Cerf, who also holds the title of "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google.

Changing media, changing statistics

It is a cliché to acknowledge the rapidly changing world of the mass media, from a static form of transmission from wireless and television sets in the living room, to communications arriving via a plethora of multimedia platforms, where my cable TV comes to me over WiFi to watch on my smart phone, radio is delivered on my IPod, and headlines from the news media are updated 24/7 online. All these developments complicate but also enrich the media environment. What is less often acknowledged is how far behind we are in monitoring use of news and information from these channels through internationally-standardized communication statistics. UNESCO is the primary agency worldwide with the responsibility to standardize, gather and disseminate communication statistics.

Anatomy of Injustice: The Unsolved Killings of Journalists in Russia

It is a sad irony: While the world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia itself is relapsing to some of its Soviet ways. In fact, for journalists, Russia is a more dangerous place now than it was during the Cold War. Only Iraq and Algeria outrank Russia on the list of most life-threatening countries for the press. Seventeen journalists have been murdered in Russia since 2000. In only one case have the killers been punished. This is a sorry record for a great and powerful nation that embarked on democratization after more than 70 years of brutal repression.